윤

Jin spotted this favorite and must’ve prompted a dream where I had access to one owned by my boss, all the more opportune because a comely English barmaid with red hair asked for a ride home. Ever the gentleman, I waited as she replaced her uniform with a tight-fitting mesh sweater. She sat to my left (hence the RHD) and we proceeded through dark, neon-lit streets, and I was impressed how the small car managed through a space that looked barely passable for a pedestrian.

Ramaswamy and Haley, right, both despicable Republican contenders on the same stage tonight noticeably of Indian origin, am I just lumping them together unfairly with twats like Bobby Jindal and Dinesh D’Souza? 한국 여자 Michelle Steel, Young Kim and 진라 don’t get a free pass, either, but I got to thinking about my Indian friends and acquaintances in high school, most of whom came from strict upbringings and showed it, such as one dude who cosplayed Alex P. Keaton everyday, briefcase and all, and the other guy who killed a salesman for a Camry.

I do keep an eye out for dogs, and this morning as I was making a right onto 166th stopped because there was one halfway into the crosswalk, no owner in sight, no collar visible. A larger one of the same breed and color, maybe its parent, stayed close to the curb next to the car and seemed to be motioning for it to return, which it finally did after the truck behind me honked. We don’t get many strays in these parts, much less partners of them (I suppose they may have been freed upon the death of their elderly master), so I wonder where they got to.

Not really much in the way of plot, but surprisingly deft driving on my part this morning, as I’m typically scraping costly side panels or running off a cliff entirely. (I recently shared with Ailee my intention to do the latter in the Seven once dementia sets in, or depending upon the clean-up cost to the family, opt for the Michael Mann ending.) Oncoming were dog-shaped robots several stories tall, and I had to swerve at high speed to avoid their legs. After half a dozen of them, I spun around and activated my secret transformation into a well-armed mech!

There was a suspicious car traveling up the street, I think maybe because the driver wasn’t immediately visible, so somehow I was able to hop in the back and confront the occupants. “This isn’t possible,” I accused, “You must be from the future!” The two or three men admitted as much, as our vehicle converted to a boat and took off on the open seas. (I was reminded of The Last Starfighter, which we watched the other night. It wasn’t really that good, was it, apart from the premise, which I’d rather have seen again on a 12-minute episode of Regular Show.) We entered a purple gash in the air, and the sky went from sunny to dark as we docked. They warned me that in their time, non-Whites were gone, purged, didn’t press for an explanation, and that I’d stick out. The city was a bland shade of brown and eerily empty of inhabitants, like an early videogame. The boy, still a four-footer, tried befriending one of the local Village of the Damned children but heeding our host’s advice, I told him to let go of her hand.

Thought-provoking foray into race relations aside, another of my familiar themes in dreams is the long journey on foot alone, often across unimaginable distances and non-navigable terrain, which may or may not be a corollary of transportation woes, though fortunately I spare myself the actual experience and only reflect upon it before or afterward. This morning I traced my trip from somewhere in northern New England to upstate New York by way of Canada and the “Madison” River, probably mistaken for the Hudson. Is there some challenge I’m bracing for, and am I burdening myself unnecessarily by taking the more difficult approach, like how I prefer to use a manual screwdriver instead of the cordless drill?

A single-lane road went around the back of the parking lot, but when I approached it to exit, two sedans were oncoming. The asphalt ahead of them was broken, though, resulting in an abrupt four-foot drop, which neither must’ve seen because the first fell head-long onto the lower ground then the one behind landed on top. It seemed like I stepped out to investigate. The driver of the buried car appeared: he (?) was a hunched humanoid, but his body was covered in a large drum-like steel shell and his head comprised of goggles for eyes and a screaming mouth. Another of its kind emerged from the wreckage and was just as angry. I left the monsters to themselves by promptly departing to their left in the original way out, glad that the dashcam had caught everything.

Has this already been done? A man’s life is linked inextricably to an ancient samurai sword somehow and becomes virtually immortal unless the weapon is broken. Well, that was the premise of the caper I took part in before waking up for good today (then again, it is Sunday), where a female Japanese detective and I uncovered the mystery, then rewound to catch a re-enactment of the origin of the bond between the two, which, to our disappointment, was lacking in special effects: he was a nobody who happened to be around when its crate was broken.

Another common disability I face in dreams is finding myself bereft of even the most basic of driving skills, a simple turn requiring power-assisted Herculean strength, the car speeding or veering out of control on eerie traffic-free freeways, and spacious lanes closing in on hundreds of dollars in deductible cosmetic damage, as it was last night, where I struggled to pull the Xterra’s yellow mirrors away from the concrete walls of a parking garage incline.

After that momentary predicament, I was on my feet but they were frozen with the rest of my body as I was approached by two back-lit figures from whose outlines I could make out were from Planet X, but they reminded me more of the aliens who beset the boys in one of the Gamera movies, squeaky voices and all.

I lie on my side but unlike Akio above I wasn’t fortunate enough to escape the encounter with only a shaved head (which frankly I’d thank them for, as of late), but a sore rectum—there was a loud banging on the door, which woke me to check the app if the camera caught anything, but it was probably just the boy in his adjoining room—might the psychosomatic pain, too, have had a more immediate source, a test of my receptivity to a different kind of pleasure?

I was hanging around with a group of friends, hoping one of them would give me a lift home; seems no app can overcome this subconscious weakness after a lifetime of unreliable transportation. Really, however, I was waiting on my love interest to return and give me the opportunity to end the night with her in the driver’s seat. In the meantime, I was preoccupied producing crumpled currency from my mouth, like that gag with the eggs, surprisingly dry and pocketed each wad for as long as they came. A ten-dollar bill I had found earlier was left in a bowl of dirty plumbing water, ordinarily a questionable place for paper with any intention of reuse, but I presumed it could be dried; when I retrieved it, the ink ran and the color was reduced to an almost transparent outline. (Reminded me of the counterfeit plot at the beginning of the 살인자의 쇼핑목록 drama I’ve been watching; it’s no Koo—then again, neither was the finale of Killing Eve—but there’s a bevy of cuties including AOA alumnus Seolhyun.) Inside the bathroom the door opened and there she was… my wife, hair tied back and makeup-less, sorrow in her large eyes that she was delayed by being invited to the Beatles concert, which I then realized was the reasonable explanation that had eluded me. In my self-absorbed distress, I had failed to appreciate her.

John Lai and his friends had started a new business selling “cars”, little remote-controlled metal boxes with caster-like wheels, and I bought one myself, though I began questioning whether you could even call them that, being useless as transportation, other than it costing two or eight thousand dollars. I helped with the design of a new sleeker model by attaching a thinner wooden panel, painted black, onto the body, holding it in place above and aligning its pegs above their matching holes. It must’ve been Houston, and I was visiting, still half-asleep with my comforter, because Rajeev Gantela showed up to discuss selling his parents’ home to Susan, who had a map of their subdivision.

Abed Nadir was behind the wheel of a 90’s ricer, which he drove us (myself and at least two others—I’d like to think Annie Edison was in the back seat with me) wildly through town, not sure any landmarks were there to recognize but I’m remembering Long Beach, because, he explained, he could only go for as long as he kept it “cool.” The word on an LED where the radio would be confirmed his status, but it disappeared when his breakneck charge relented, and walls of multi-colored spikes rose up before us to hinder any progress, following his desperate right turns. Eventually he realized the game was over and stopped the car, and we stepped out onto the broken pavement in the low light before dawn.